Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 3, No.1: 143-154
The Effect of Confucian Values on Support
for
Democracy and Human Rights in Taiwan
Joel S. Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper
Abstract
Recent years have seen a great deal of interest in the extent to which “Asian
values,” or Confucian ideology, inhibit a country’s acceptance of liberaldemocratic values. Much of that research, however, focused on the experience
of nondemocratic states, concentrated on theory rather than empirical analysis,
was written before the complete democratization of Taiwan, and/or created
a pan-Confucian-values index instead of estimating the effects of the main
components of Confucianism (family loyalty, social hierarchies, and social
harmony) individually. In this article, we review theoretical arguments for why
Confucian values would decrease public support for democratization, women’s
rights, and freedom of speech. We then use OLS and Logit to estimate models
of data from the Taiwan subsamples of the 1995 World Values Study and the
2001 East Asia Barometer. Our results indicate that adherence to Confucian
values did not consistently undermine public support for liberal democracy in
1995 and even increased support for some liberal-democratic values in 2001.
Our findings thus disconfirm previous empirical research on this question. The
article concludes by discussing how Confucian and liberal-democratic values
might reinforce rather than undermine each other.
The traditional culture of China has conferred upon the Chinese
a wide range of unseemly characteristics....The political and social
system engendered by Chinese-style feudalism was so contrary to
every notion of human rights, that one could say that there was no
such thing as human rights in China.
Bo Yang, The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture
Joel Fetzer is Associate Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University. <joel.fetzer@
pepperdine.edu> J. Christopher Soper is Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University.
<[email protected]> A preliminary version of this article was presented at the annual
meeting of the American Association for Chinese Studies, in Riverside, California, October 20-22,
2006; another version will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science
Association, in Chicago, August 29-September 2, 2007.
July 2007 | 143
There is thus no basis for asserting any inherent incompatibility between
Confucianism and the human rights to which nations subscribe.
Wm. Theodore de Bary, Asian Values and Human Rights
The relationship among Confucianism, political development, and some form
of democracy has generated a great deal of controversy in recent decades.
Claiming that Confucianism inhibited political progress and economic
expansion and that it was hostile to Communism, Mao Zedong, or at least
some leaders of the Cultural Revolution, tried to eradicate this system of
thought.1 More recently, Lee Kuan Yew2 has extolled “Asian values”-a proxy
for a particular form of Confucianism-for promoting economic development
and political stability, but also for limiting the kind of “excessive” personal
liberties exercised in the West. President Kim Dae Jung of Korea and President
Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan countered that Lee Kuan Yew had misappropriated
the Confucian tradition for his own self-interested purposes.3 It would be easy
to claim that this argument said more about the contested nature of politics
than it did about any inherent interpretive issues within Confucianism, except
that a similar theoretical debate about the compatibility of Confucianism and
democracy also divides social scientists.4 Scholars such as Robert Weatherly5
and Peter Moody6 highlight how the traditional Confucian stress on hierarchy,
social order, and an individual’s duty toward others, and an absence of any
particular notion of individual rights might inhibit efforts to promote liberal
democracy. Samuel Huntington speaks of the “rejection of individualism
and the prevalence of a soft form of authoritarianism or limited forms of
1A.
James Gregor and Maria Hsia Chang, “Anti-Confucianism: Mao’s Last Campaign,” Asian
Survey 19, no. 11 (1979): 1073-1092, and Conrad Schirokauer, A Brief History of Chinese
Civilization (Stamford, CT: Thomson Learning, 1991): 368.
2Fareed Zakaria, “A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (1994): 109126. See also Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First, the Singapore Story: 1965-2000 (New
York: Harper Collins, 2000).
3Kim Dae Jung, “Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia’s Anti-Democratic Values,” Foreign
Affairs 73 (November-December 1994): 189-194, and Lee Teng-hui, “Chinese Culture and
Political Renewal,” Journal of Democracy 6 (October 1995): 3-8.
4Michael D. Barr, “Lee Kuan Yew and the ‘Asian Values’ Debate,” Asian Studies Review 24, no.
3 (2000): 309-334; Michael Jacobsen and Ole Bruun, eds., Human Rights and Asian Values:
Contesting National Identities and Cultural Representations in Asia (Richmond, England:
Curzon Press, 2000); Young-Bae Song, “Crisis of Cultural Identity in East Asia: On the Meaning
of Confucian Ethics in an Age of Globalization,” Asia Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2002): 109-125;
Tan Yuanping, Zhongguo zhengzhi sixiang: Rujia yu minzhuhua [Chinese political thought:
Confucianism and democratization] (Taipei: Yangzhi wenhuashiye gufen youxian gongsi, 2004);
and Xu Fuguan and Xiao Xinyi, Rujia zhengzhi sixiang yu minzhu ziyou renquan [Confucian
political thought and democratic freedom and human rights] (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju,
1988).
5Robert Weatherly, The Discourse of Human Rights in China (London: Macmillan Press, 1999).
6Peter R. Moody, “Asian Values,” Journal of International Affairs 50, no. 1 (1996):166-192.
144 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 3, No.1
democracy”7 in East Asian societies that are imbued with Confucian values.
Joseph Chan,8 Michael Freeman,9 and Wm. Theodore de Bary,10 on the other
hand, counter that the Confucian tradition is flexible, that it allows for more
than one interpretation, and that it can be used as a basis for democracy and
human rights.
While political leaders and theorists extensively debate the question of
Confucianism and democracy, far fewer empirical studies have measured the
relationship between these variables. We know of only three relevant quantitative
investigations in East Asia. Chang, Chu, and Tsai conclude that “Confucian
values have a negative influence on democratic values.” They believe that the
democratic future in East Asia is bright, but only because modernization will
undermine support for Confucian values.11 Andrew Nathan and Tse-hsin Chen
similarly find that “people with traditional values in all three societies (Taiwan,
China, Hong Kong) were highly unlikely to hold democratic values.”12 Finally,
Chong-Min Park and Doh Chull Shin are more equivocal in their study of
Asian values in South Korea, finding that certain Confucian values undermine
democratic values, others support it, and still others have no effect.13 Clearly,
much more empirical work remains to be done on this important dispute.
In this article, we propose to test the effect of Confucian values on mass
public attitudes toward democracy, women’s rights, and freedom of speech
in Taiwan. We selected these values because they have been articulated as
fundamental human rights through international declarations, treaties, and
conventions. The first and most important of these statements, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, affirms in article 19 that “everyone has the right
to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold
7Samuel
P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1996), 108.
8Joseph Chan, “A Confucian Perspective on Human Rights,” in The East Asian Challenge for
Human Rights, ed. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 212-237.
9Michael Freeman, “Human Rights: Asia and the West,” Human Rights and International
Relations in the Asia-Pacific Region, ed. James T.H. Tang (London: Pinter, 1995), 13-24.
10Wm. Theodore de Bary, Asian Values and Human Rights: A Confucian Communitarian
Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
11Yu-Tzung Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Frank Tsai, “Confucianism and Democratic Values in
Three Chinese Societies,” Issues & Studies 41, no. 4 (December 2005): 1-33.
12Andrew Nathan and Tse-hsin Chen, “Traditional Social Values, Democratic Values, and Political
Participation,” Asian Barometer Working Paper No. 23, 2004, p.4, http://asianbarometer.org/
newenglish/publications/ workingpapers/no.23.pdf (accessed August 16, 2006).
13Chong-Min Park and Doh Chull Shin, “Do Asian Values Deter Popular Support for Democracy?
The Case of South Korea,” Asian Barometer Working Paper No. 26, 2004, http://asianbarometer.
org/newenglish/ publications/workingpapers/no.1.pdf (accessed August 16, 2006). See also
Doh Chul Shin, Myung Chey, and Kwang-Woong Kim, “Cultural Origins of Public Support
for Democracy in Korea: An Empirical Test of the Douglas-Wildavsky Theory of Culture,”
Comparative Political Studies 22, no. 2 (July 1989): 217-238.
July 2007 | 145
opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information
and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Article 21 of the
same treaty states that “everyone has the right to take part in the government
of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives” and that
“the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this
will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by
universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent
free voting procedures.”14 In a similar way, the United Nation Convention on
the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women recognizes the
“dignity and worth of the human person and... the equal rights of men and
women.”15 Although these norms are not without controversy and interpretive
debate, they have become the basis by which the international community
defines individual, gender, and political rights. As such, it is important to
discover if Confucianism, as an ideological tradition, is consonant with those
values.
We chose Taiwan for several reasons. First, the society is infused with
Confucian values.16 Unlike China, it never experienced the anti-Confucian
campaign of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, Chiang Kai-shek encouraged the
inculcation of Confucianism, paying for the building of numerous Confucian
temples and mandating the teaching of his version of the tradition in the public
schools.17 Second, Taiwan has evolved into a vibrant, multiparty democracy18
and as such can serve as a model for other Confucian-oriented societies in the
region that have not yet fully democratized. As the first culturally Chinese
democracy, Taiwan is thus a counter example to the argument that a Confucian
society can never produce a liberal democracy.19 Finally, Taiwan is an open
research environment, where respondents to public opinion surveys are free to
express their honest views without fear of governmental retribution.
Our article differs from the three existing empirical studies in several
respects. Nathan and Chen20 specifically address the question of Confucianism
14United
Nations General Assembly, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York:
United Nations, 1948).
15United Nations General Assembly, Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination
against Women (New York: United Nations, 1979).
16Gary Marvin Davison and Barbara E. Reed, Culture and Customs of Taiwan (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1998), 34-37.
17Christian Jochim, “Carrying Confucianism into the Modern World,” in Religion in Modern
Taiwan: Tradition and Innovation in a Changing Society, ed. Philip Clart and Charles B. Jones
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 48-83.
18John F. Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province? 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
2003), 241-243.
19Linda Chao and Ramon H. Myers, The First Chinese Democracy: Political Life in the Republic
of China on Taiwan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
20Nathan and Chen, “Traditional Social Values, Democratic Values, and Political Participation.”
146 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 3, No.1
and democracy, but they base their findings on data only from 1993, before
it was completely apparent that Taiwan would fully democratize. It was not
until 1996, after all, that Taiwan held its first direct presidential election.21
Our study compares data from 1995, in the midst of Taiwan’s democratization,
with those from 2001, after Taiwan had fully democratized and the Democratic
Progressive Party had gained control of the presidency.22 The two data sets
allow us to evaluate whether Confucianism has different effects in an emerging
as opposed to a more mature democracy.
Chang, Chu, and Tsai do look at the more recent 2001 data, but we see
potential problems with the way in which they operationalize Confucianism. In
particular, they conflate all “traditional Confucian ethics” into a single composite
index. The six component indicators, however, seem to overemphasize
the particular Confucian value that Park and Shin23 call “Group Primacy”
(questions Q064, Q065, and CN74E) but underemphasize the Confucian value
of Social Harmony (only question Q066). Although their resulting index seems
to hold together well, their use of a composite index could obscure the extent
to which different components of Confucianism may have divergent effects on
support for liberal democracy. This suspicion is at least partly confirmed by
Park and Shin, who break Confucianism into its chief component values instead
of creating a single composite index. Using Korean data, these authors find that
the individual Confucian values, which they labeled Social Hierarchy, Social
Harmony, Group Primacy, and Anti-Pluralism, all had statistically significant
effects on opposition to authoritarianism, but those effects were signed in
different directions. Such results suggest that using a composite Confucianism
index or a related technique (e.g., factor analysis treating Confucianism as a
single dimension) is not theoretically justifiable. Since Park and Shin look only
at Korean data, it seemed useful to conduct a parallel analysis of Taiwan.
Data and Models
In order to test these hypotheses, we analyzed two Taiwanese public opinion
surveys. The first is the 1995 Taiwanese subset of the World Values Survey.24
Obtaining a sample size of 780, the Survey Research Center of Academia Sinica
in Taipei fielded the poll in July 1995, using face-to-face personal interviews
21Denny
Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 195202.
22Ibid., 227-240.
23Park and Shin, “Do Asian Values Deter Popular Support for Democracy? The Case of South
Korea.”
24Ronald Inglehart et al., “European and World Values Survey Integrated Data File, 1999-2002,
Release I,” University of Michigan, second ICPSR version #3975, January 2005. Neither the
producers nor the distributors of these data are responsible for our analysis or interpretations.
July 2007 | 147
in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Hakka. The second survey is the Taiwanese
subsample of the 2001 Asian Barometer Survey.25 Again using face-to-face
interviews, Academia Sinica sampled 1,416 Taiwanese voting-eligible citizens
older than nineteen, using the Probability Proportional to Size method during
June-July 2001.
Confucianism is a rich and complex tradition that does not easily lend itself
to simple definitions. What we seek to measure is a least-common-denominator
Confucianism that is true to the tradition but does not predetermine our empirical
results by veering either in a legalist, antidemocratic direction26 or by taking
on a Mencius-based, prodemocratic slant.27 Our definition of Confucianism
generally follows that of Park and Shin, except that we do not include
antipluralism. The questions these scholars used to measure antipluralism
(e.g., “If people have too many different ways of thinking, society will be
chaotic”) seem to presuppose the result of our model of freedom of speech.
If from the outset we define Confucianism as opposed to any challenge to
the dominant social group, the findings of our later regression analysis would
be pre-ordained. Our definition also differs from that of Park and Shin by
replacing their “group primacy” with our “family loyalty.” Although we agree
that Confucianism emphasizes the group over the individual, we believe this
ideology preferences loyalty to the family over ties to any other group. Three
of the “five constant relationships” involve family relations, for example, and
Confucius described “filial piety and fraternal submission” as “the root of all
benevolent actions [仁之本].”28
Therefore, we will define Confucianism as an ethical system that places
primary emphasis on family loyalty, social hierarchies, and social harmony.29
We were able to identify usable questions from each of the surveys to measure
these three aspects of Confucianism. Out of the universe of all questions in the
1995 and 2001 surveys, we chose one indicator for each of the three Confucian
values. For the 1995 survey, our indicator of family loyalty was whether a
main goal of the respondent’s life has been “to make my parents proud.” Our
25Data
analyzed in this article were collected by the East Asia Barometer Project (2000-2004),
which was co-directed by Professors Fu Hu and Yun-han Chu and received major funding
support from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education, Academia Sinica, and National Taiwan University.
The Asian Barometer Project Office (www.asianbarometer.org) is responsible only for data
distribution. The authors are grateful to the above directors and institutes for these data; neither
the producers nor distributors are responsible for our analysis or interpretations.
26Conrad Schirokauer, A Brief History of Chinese Civilization, 37, 47-49, and Han Fei Zi, Han Fei
Tzu-Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).
27Conrad Schirokauer, A Brief History of Chinese Civilization, 42, and Mencius, Mencius, trans.
D.C. Lau (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1970).
28Confucius, Confucian Analects, The Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, trans. James
Legge (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 139.
29Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, Understanding Confucianism (London: Duncan Baird Publishers,
2003).
148 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 3, No.1
measure of support for social hierarchies was if the respondent agreed that
people in Taiwan should have “greater respect for authority.” Finally, the
item for social harmony was whether interviewees believed that an employee
should “follow one’s superior’s instructions at work even when one does not
fully agree with them.” In the 2001 survey, the indicator for family loyalty
was whether “for the sake of the family, the individual should put his or her
personal interests second.” The measure for social hierarchies was whether,
when there is a quarrel, “we should ask an elder to resolve the dispute.” The
question for social harmony was whether the best way to resolve conflict with
a neighbor was to “accommodate the other person.” We acknowledge that our
operationalization of Confucianism is not perfect, but we believe it is the best
possible using secondary analysis of these two pre-existing data sets.
Our first dependent variable was support for democracy. In 1995, the four
indicators we used to create a democracy index were: whether interviewees
supported “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament
and elections” and “having a democratic political system,” and whether they
agreed with the statements, “democracies are not good at maintaining order”
and “democracy may have problems, but it is better than any other form of
government.” The 2001 indicators were: a one-to-ten scale measuring “to
what extent would you want our country to be democratic now?”; whether
“democracy is better than any other kind of government”; and whether “we
should get rid of parliament and elections and have a strong leader decide
things.” Freedom of speech was our second dependent variable. The one
indicator for the 1995 survey was whether one of the country’s chief aims
should be “protecting freedom of speech.” In 2001, the two freedom of speech
questions were whether the government should “decide if certain ideas should
be allowed to be discussed in society,” and whether “a political leader should
tolerate the views of those who challenge his political ideals.” Finally, to
determine support for women’s rights, we used the following three indicators
from the 1995 survey: “when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a
job than women”; “on the whole men make better political leaders than women
do”; and “a university education is more important for a boy than for a girl.”
The one women’s rights indicator for the 2001 survey was “a man will lose
face if he works under a female supervisor.”
The first issue we explored was the extent to which Taiwan is a Confucian
society. Table 1 indicates the percentage of our respondents who agreed
with each of the indicators of the three different Confucian values in the two
surveys. These results demonstrate that, in both 1995 and 2001, respondents
gave overwhelming support to at least one indicator of a Confucian value and
majority or near-majority support to a second, but lower acquiescence to a
third. In 1995, for example, nearly two-thirds of interviewees agreed that one
of the major life goals was to “make their parents proud,” while in 2001 a
slightly larger percentage affirmed that a person should put his or her interests
“second” for the sake of the family. Partly because the 1995 and 2001 surveys
July 2007 | 149
Table 1. Levels of Support for Confucian Values, 1995 and 2001
1995 World Values Survey
Question
Percent Agree
Make Parents Proud (family loyalty)
63.4
Greater Respect for Authority (social hierarchies)
44.8
Follow Superior’s Instructions at Work (social harmony)
15.4
2001 Asian Barometer
Put Family First (family loyalty)
86.2
Elders Should Resolve Disputes (social hierarchies)
68.9
Give in to Avoid Conflict (social harmony)
46.1
did not ask identical questions measuring the particular Confucian values we
are studying, we are not convinced that support for all three Confucian values
increased from 1995 to 2001. On the indicator for social harmony, for example,
superficial analysis of table 1 might suggest that 30 percent more respondents
supported this fundamental Confucian virtue. Yet, the very different wording
of questions from the two surveys likely explains this apparent revival of
Taiwanese Confucianism over the six years. The two items on social harmony
may be providing substantially different results because the 1995 indicator
could be measuring interviewees’ willingness to disobey an unjust order as
well as their preference for social harmony. Ideally, we would have liked to
have used identical questions, but we were instead limited by the items actually
asked in the two surveys.
In order to test the net effect of Confucianism on liberal democracy, we
used ordinary least-squares or Logit regression to estimate the effect of each
of the three Confucian values on the various dependent variables for both
the 1995 and 2001 surveys. Although we focused mainly on the effect of the
three Confucian values, we also controlled for such demographic variables
as education, income, religious identification, gender, age, ethnicity, and
urbanicity.
Findings
Tables 2 and 3 present the results of our regression analysis. In 1995, no
Confucian value had any statistically significant effect on either democratization
or freedom of speech. Family loyalty and social harmony, however, did
undermine support for women’s rights (b = -.246, p < .05; b = -.193; p < .05;
respectively). In 2001, the effect of two Confucian values remained unchanged.
Social hierarchies still failed to achieve statistical significance in any of the
three equations, while social harmony continued to undermine women’s rights
only. The Confucian value of family loyalty, on the other hand, seemed to
have been dramatically transformed by democratization. Adherence to this
150 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 3, No.1
Table 2. Regression Models of Three Confucian Values
and Support for Liberal Democracy in 1995
Democratization
Freedom of Speech
Women’s Rights
.060
-.079
-.246*
Social Hierarchies
-.165
-.128
-.063
Social Harmony
-.044
-.247
-.193*
Income
-.009
Family Loyalty
Education
Female
-.008
-.001
.076*
-.033
.041
-.359*
-.462*
.078
Age
.006
.003
.001
Mainlander
.214
-.020
.528*
.046
.170
-.463*
-.385
.372
.188
Yuanzhumin
Other Ethnicity
Urbanicity
.177*
-.010
-.132*
Christian
.835*
.219
-.340
Not Religious
.167
.312
Single
.309
.370
.488*
R2/Nagelkerke R2
.079
.044
.134
χ2
18.731
Degrees of Freedom
14
N
609
660
.296*
647
Source: Data from Taiwan subset of 1995 World Values Study.
Note: Equations for Democratization and Women’s Rights estimated using ordinary
least-squares regression, while equation for Freedom of Speech estimated
with dichotomous Logit. All regressors are dummy variables except for
Democratization (range = 6 to 16), Women’s Rights (3 to 11), Family Loyalty
(1 to 4), Social Hierarchies (1 to 3), Social Harmony (1 to 3), Income (1 to 10),
Education (1 to 8), Age (20 to 75), and Urbanicity (4 to 8). *p < .05.
value now increased support for both democratization and women’s rights (b
= .277, p < .05; b = .361; p < .05, respectively), but it appears to have reduced
sympathy for freedom of speech (b = -.085, p < .05).
Some of our control variables produced a few unanticipated results. Despite
the widespread assumption that Taiwan is a society riven by ethnic strife, our
three indicators of ethnicity (i.e., Mainlander, Yuanzhuren, and Other Ethnicity
[largely Hakka]) produced almost nothing that reached statistical significance.
In 2001, no ethnicity variable had any effect. In 1995, ethnicity mattered only
for support for woman’s rights. Not surprisingly, however, higher education
led to increased support for democratization in both years. Also intriguing is
the effect of being a woman. In 1995, women were, everything else being
July 2007 | 151
Table 3. Regression Models of Three Confucian Values
and Support for Liberal Democracy in 2001
Democratization
Family Loyalty
.277*
Freedom of Speech
Women’s Rights
-.085*
.361*
Social Hierarchies
-.206
-.046
-.081
Social Harmony
-.157
.026
-.452*
.045*
-.061
Income
.115
Education
.102*
Female
Age
Mainlander
Yuanzhumin
-.007
.172*
-.087
.047
.013
-.007*
-.004
.434*
-.207
-.039
-.003
.392
-.177
-.608
Other Ethnicity
-.080
-.127
.360
Urbanicity
-.001
.022
.037
.030
-.016
.540*
-.119
.102
.017
Single
.228
-.004
.019
R2/Nagelkerke R2
.084
.043
.103
Christian
Not Religious
100.484*
χ2
Degrees of Freedom
N
14
995
1037
1169
Source: Data from Taiwan subset of 2001 Asian Barometer.
Note: Equations for Democratization and Freedom of Speech estimated using ordinary
least-squares regression, while equation for Women’s Rights estimated with
ordered Logit. All regressors are dummy variables except for Democratization
(range = 5 to 17), Freedom of Speech (2 to 8), Women’s Rights (1 to 4), Family
Loyalty (1 to 4), Social Hierarchies (1 to 4), Social Harmony (1 to 4), Income (1
to 5), Education (1 to 10), Age (21 to 89) and Urbanicity (1 to 8). *p < .05.
equal, less likely to support democratization (b = -.359, p < .05) and freedom
of speech (b = -.462, p < .05). By 2001, however, being female had no effect on
democratization and freedom of speech, but did increase support for women’s
rights (b = .434, p < .05). In 1995, being a Christian seems to have increased
support for democratization (b = .835, p < .05). Perhaps because many leaders
or supporters of the democracy movement were Christian clergy,30 Christian
30Shih
Ming-teh, “Taiwan,” in To be Free: Stories from Asia’s Struggle against Oppression,
ed. Chee Soon Juan (Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1998), 6-51; Shelley Rigger,
Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 117-118;
and Roy, Taiwan: A Political History, 169.
152 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 3, No.1
laity undoubtedly received prodemocracy cues from the pulpit or their coreligionists. Once democracy had become an established fact in 2001, however,
the Christian variable no longer achieved statistical significance.
Conclusion
One important finding from our analysis is that Confucian values do not
consistently undermine liberal democracy. None of the three Confucian values
(i.e., family loyalty, social hierarchies, social harmony) reduces support for
democratization. Only on women’s rights do we find any possible pattern
of conflict between human rights and Confucian values. Social harmony, in
particular, seems always to decrease adherence to the rights of women. Family
loyalty, on the other hand, showed a similar pattern in 1995, but by 2001 was
boosting support for women’s rights.
A second key result is that our empirical outcome appears to have bolstered
our case for considering each Confucian value separately à la Park and Shin,
instead of conflating the various components of Confucianism into a single
index. In 2001, for example, the effect of social harmony on women’s rights
was statistically significant and negative, the influence of family loyalty was
statistically significant but positive, and the impact of social hierarchies did not
achieve statistical significance. Had we combined these three elements into a
single scale, we would have missed the real variations among their effects.
Our data indicate that Confucian values remain strong in Taiwanese society,
and we have no reason to believe that these values are likely to disappear
anytime soon. Instead of vanishing from the world as many social scientists
predicted, religion and related ideologies, in fact, have become more significant
in social and political life in the twenty-first century. Further, we hope that
liberal democracy will remain the political norm in Taiwan and spread to other
parts of East Asia. The question, then, is whether or how democracy and the
several Confucian values can reinforce each other. For our part, we believe that
such an accommodation is both feasible and desirable.31
The history of Christianity in the West illustrates how a deeply rooted
religious tradition is malleable over time. At different times, both Protestant
and Catholic churches opposed political and economic liberalism.32 The
Roman Catholic Church, in particular, took several centuries to make its peace
with such ideas as majoritarian rule and civil liberties. However, the churches
31For
a similar view, see Joseph B. Tamney and Linda Hsueh-Ling Chiang, Modernization,
Globalization, and Confucianism in Chinese Societies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2002).
32Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1996), and Andrew C. Gould, Origins of Liberal Dominance: State, Church, & Party in
Nineteenth-Century Europe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1999).
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eventually redirected their focus to those parts of the Christian tradition that
supported these fundamental principles. While a few Christians today chafe at
political majoritarianism, the vast majority of churches now embrace liberal
democracy. We believe that Confucianism also contains many intellectual
resources that would allow this ideology to be reconfigured in a democratic
direction.
A number of Confucian values could be used to temper the excesses of
Western-style democracy and individualism. Confucianism’s communal ethos
recognizes the most salient intermediary institution, the extended family,
which binds human beings together into a meaningful community. Likewise,
the stress on social harmony can serve as a valuable check on the tendency in
some forms of political liberalism toward the prioritization of individual rights
with no thought to the social and cultural context through which those rights
can be expressed. Finally, filial piety might help individuals see beyond their
narrow self-interest to embrace obligations they have to previous generations.
On the other hand, some formulations of particular Confucian values
certainly can reduce respect for women. In particular, traditional Confucianism’s
emphasis on social harmony seems to be hindering the efforts of individual
Taiwanese women to advance gender equality. One can certainly also understand
how traditional Confucianism’s inordinate deference to authority would run
counter to the liberal principle that each human being has the right to equal
political influence and is equally capable of political rationality. Assuming that
only scholars or men may rule similarly violates this central democratic tenet.
Equally problematic is the presumption that only the politically powerful may
articulate the meaning of Confucianism. Our data suggest, however, that, with
the exception of women’s rights, the mass public in Taiwan is unlikely to hold
these traditionalist views of what Confucianism means.
Democracy and Confucian values are not incompatible, in short, but neither
is a marrying of these perspectives inevitable. If history is any judge, political
leaders will manipulate Confucian values for the leaders’ self-interested
purposes; we can only hope that citizens will offer counter interpretations that
highlight the more democratically inclined features of the tradition.
154 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 3, No.1